Matthew Boyle

Amid pressure from left-wing advocacy organization Color of Change, the Huffington Post removed conservative publisher Andrew Breitbart’s blog from its front page last week. But Breitbart is furious that the liberal site’s top brass refused to defend him against the racism allegations made by Color of Change.

Color of Change and its founder Van Jones, the former White House green jobs czar who also previously advised Arianna Huffington during her 2003 California gubernatorial campaign, alleged that Breitbart was a racist during its pressure campaign. In its statement last week explaining its decision to remove Breitbart’s blog from being featured on its front page because of what HuffPo called “ad hominem” attacks against Jones that Breitbart made to The Daily Caller, HuffPo made no statement to defend Breitbart from allegations that he is racist, even though Breitbart told TheDC that site founder Huffington and her top deputy, editor Roy Sekoff, know he isn’t one. Breitbart even said Sekoff told him he recommended to Huffington that she publicly state that Breitbart is no racist – and allegedly had language ready in a statement for her to use.

“Roy said he put a statement for Arianna in that language [that Breitbart was not a racist] and she chose not to use it,” Breitbart told TheDC. Breitbart said he tried to reach Sekoff and Huffington several times after they removed him from HuffPo’s front page. After he finally got Sekoff on the line, Breitbart said Sekoff told him he was, “arguing with her [Huffington] that she should defend me on the race accusation that they’re making.”

“I consider it the height of ingratitude that Arianna sides with Van Jones whose hapless management of Arianna’s California gubernatorial campaign made her finish with less than one percent of the vote, yet I’m the one who resurrected her Van Jones-created demise to help create for her the very institution she’s now using to shut me up,” Breitbart, who helped Huffington set up her hugely successful left-wing website, told TheDC. “The ingratitude is monumental and for her to be silent on the race question for cynical partisan reasons shows everything you need to know about this woman’s character. There’s a thread of hope in my heart that she will do the ethical thing and tell her audience what she really feels about my not being a racist.”

Sekoff and HuffPo spokesman Mario Ruiz would neither confirm nor deny to TheDC that Huffington removed language from last week’s statement defending Breitbart against charges of racism. But, through Ruiz, Sekoff told TheDC he does not think Breitbart is a racist.

“Roy absolutely does not think Andrew Breitbart is a racist, as he made clear to me during discussions this week about whether to continue front paging Breitbart,” Ruiz said in an email to TheDC. “He was taken down from the front not for being racist, but for the nature of his attack on Van Jones, as we’ve made clear.”